


apotheosis of groundlessness

by ladymemebeth



Category: Blur (Band), British Singers RPF, Music RPF
Genre: 1995, Art History, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Suicide Attempt, the international implications of country house and its terrible music video
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27205432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymemebeth/pseuds/ladymemebeth
Summary: A moment passes. Inside, the party continues, oblivious. If Damon doesn't say anything, it might be hours before anyone else realizes what has happened. No one else will know except for you and him. And you won't really know anyway because you'll be dead.(set on that one night in august 1995.)
Relationships: Damon Albarn/Graham Coxon
Comments: 13
Kudos: 27





	apotheosis of groundlessness

**Author's Note:**

> okay look. i never expected to be writing rpf for a 90s pop group at my big age but i also never expected to be living through a global pandemic at any age, so. time makes fools of us all or whatever.
> 
> cw for suicide attempt, references to substance abuse (alcoholism)

_“3. HOW I WOULD PAINT DEATH_

_White on white or black on black._

_No ground, no figure. An immense canvas,_

_which I will never finish._

_4\. HOW I WOULD PAINT LOVE_

_I would not paint love.”_

_— Lisel Mueller_

* * *

They say suicide is a self-centered act, but as you stand on a fire escape six stories up you can only think of other people. Although, actually, if you're being honest—and why not be honest with oneself on one's deathbed—you _are_ thinking of yourself the only way you can bear to, which is refracted through other people. All great artists are drunkards; all great artists die by their own hand. van Gogh, Rothko, Gorky. That American girl who jumped out of the window of her Manhattan apartment and got famous afterwards, too little too late. Art can only save so much of a person's soul after all. You think about them and in your mind you are following their wisdom because it is better to jump on purpose rather than drink yourself to death by accident. Better to jump than to fall or be pushed. The pavement below is murky; if you took off your glasses it would dissolve into shadows, sloshing slightly as if turned to liquid. 

You know he's there before you turn round to catch a glimpse of him from within the sitting room. He hasn't turned the lights on, as if the sudden brightness—rather than his unexpected presence—might have startled you off the sill. 

"I thought I locked the door," you tell the warm night air. 

"You did." It was something you had taught yourselves how to do when you were younger, looking to kill time, looking to seem clever. A party trick. So here he is at a party, picking locks even as he's being handed the keys to the world. It’s a clever turn of phrase, one he would like if you told him. You do not tell him.

He steps into the weak light of the streetlamp. He is beautiful in the tiresome way he always has been, a figure out of a Bouguereau painting. That stupid pose of piety he's so fond of: hands clasped and gaze tilted heavenwards. You hate Bouguereau and Cot and their perfect likenesses; you find them unnerving the way some people find abstract expressionist portraits unnerving. You've never liked that kind of realism, pristine to the point of lifelessness. It's a technique better suited to capturing cut flowers and diced fruits and dead birds strung up by their tiny ankles, you think, than still-warm flesh. You've always favored abstraction anyway. When you saw a de Kooning for the first time at the Tate Modern it was as if you could suddenly hear the blood roaring in your ears at a thousand decibels, stunned that something so inert as a painted canvas could fill you with such a rush of adrenaline. You were eleven years old and terrified by the feeling and also instantly in love with it, riveted by the knowledge that you'd chase it for the rest of your life. You're aware of the parallels there in the timeline but you ignore them. When you look at a Bouguereau you feel nothing, only the cold stillness of things long kept behind glass.

"Are you going to do it?" His tone is almost goading, like he's daring you to, like he doesn't believe you can. That frisson of suggestiveness, a hint at some sort of power play with terms to which you did not agree. It makes you feel angry and embarrassed at the same time. It makes you feel young. _I'll show him_. 

Yet your feet remain rooted to the chipped metal of the fire escape. A moment passes. Inside, the party continues, oblivious. If Damon doesn't say anything, it might be hours before anyone else realizes what has happened. No one else will know except for you and him. And you won't really know anyway because you'll be dead.

"Did you leave a note?"

"No." _I'm not like you_ , you think. _I don't always have to get the last word._

“Fucking hell.” There's a gentle clicking sound and Damon's face glows as he lights a cigarette, his skin a deep ochre in the focused pool of light. He narrows his eyes at you through the cloud of smoke. "What am I to tell them, then? If you didn't leave a note."

 _You don't have to tell them anything,_ you want to say, but you know that he will not accept this as an answer. No one else would accept it either, except maybe Dave, in his own strangely somber way. Alex would wring it out of him, desperate and wheedling and then begrudgingly mollified by whatever explanation Damon provided. Stephen, Smoggy, Jane, Justine, your parents—they'd all want to know. The fans, to whom you can never refer using a possessive pronoun. Irritation creeps in and again you feel embarrassed. _Don't make a fuss_ , you want to say. 

He sighs loudly, obnoxiously. He lets the cigarette smolder as he presses a thumb into the corner of his eye. He starts to say your name or perhaps your nickname, the single syllable he's always employed to get your attention across classrooms and stages, a soft aborted growl. He stops. You keep looking at the ground below. If he tries to reach a hand out or move any closer to you than where he currently is a meter away you'll punch him in the jaw. 

"You know I—we—love you." 

_That's not what this is about,_ you want to say. Please God don't let him think that's what this is about. 

"Well," he says after he realizes you aren't going to reply, "is there anything I can do to change your mind?" His voice is light but you know he isn't joking. In fact that's what bothers you about the question: you know you could say nearly anything and he'd do it just because it was you who said it. He had been that way even as a teenager, clever and coolly standoffish but still deep down eager to please. It’s sort of like a secret to know this about him, some private knowledge only gained through years of observation. It’s a weakness, maybe. You are the soft spot in his underbelly where someone would plunge a blade if they wanted to fatally wound him, and he yours. 

You both have that power over people, and perhaps that's what keeps you together more than anything else: the pull of your individual orbits is stronger than most people's. Damon because he is beautiful and you because you are. _(I am what?)_ You first became aware of it at Goldsmiths in the flushed expression on Alex's face when he showed up outside your dorm room, leant against the door jamb in a bad imitation of casualness. It turned you on and scared you in equal measure to have that sway over someone who was so guileless about it the way Damon never was with you, the way Alex never was with anybody else. You were sort of awful about it at first, close to manipulative, mostly just to prove that you were capable of that kind of cruelty and because you were frightened by how lonely you were. But Alex himself had acquired it later, alongside the fame. He sought out and relished the resulting attention in a way that sort of made you sick to watch sometimes. Damon took it in stride for the most part, playing at both bemusement and boredom, his hands up in a deflective gesture that ultimately did little to disguise how much he thrived on outside validation, how he had grown to expect it. That sort of thing doesn't move you, not anymore. It had once been thrilling to realize you existed in the minds of others, that people thought about you or even talked about you when you weren't there. And then it became something closer to terrifying when you were forced to realize that you were never really you in other people's eyes but rather some invention of their own that took the shape of your body, that spoke in your voice. 

You are so sick of the sound of your own voice. 

That's the appeal of painting, you reckon: no physical remnants of the self in the final product. Of course people would always want to know what everything _means_ , but past a certain point of abstraction any objective meaning in visual art is pretty much moot. A song is composed of a dozen individual parts, easy enough to dissect if you know what you’re listening for. But paint tends to blur together until the layers of pigment are indistinguishable. 

He remains in your periphery, just where your eyesight slips out of focus. You shift your gaze outwards at the skyline where there are no stars, just the clinging fog of early morning on its way in from the sea. Even in the dead of night, absent much streetlight, London is still unmistakably London. You had been so excited to be here when you were eighteen. Away from the suburbs and walking around aimlessly for hours, looking for something to do but also sort of hoping you never came across anything to distract you from the mundanities at hand, the simple familiarity of the afterschool sun as it slanted across Damon’s cheeks.

The first time you got drunk was with him, by the river behind his house with bottles of wine stolen from his dad. You were both so wasted that when he kissed you, poorly, with too much tongue you only laughed and kissed back and then an hour later, already approaching blackout, you shat yourself. It was disgusting and stupid but at the time, as with everything with Damon at that age, it was spectacularly funny and weirdly life-affirming. It was also a sign of things to come, of countless other stumbling-drunk early mornings and spilled bodily fluids, of waking up and getting the sense that you ought to feel ashamed of something but not able to remember what exactly it was and therefore unable to give much of a fuck. That was what you liked so much about drink: how it reduced you to the stupid animal of your body. You could take or leave the defecating on yourself bit, but everything else about it was its own kind of mindless bliss not unlike performing or painting. 

You should have stayed an artist, you think. The thought knocked on your skull from the inside as you watched Damien stride onto the music video set like the art world big shot you always suspected he would become. You could have been going to gallery shows rather than release parties. The art world was its own kind of closed ecosystem, a lopsided food chain not unlike the music industry at all. You wonder if you would have felt like less of a fraud while schmoozing with Damien and Sam and the rest of the Saatchi darlings than you do now during press releases and Italian TV appearances, hungover and never sure of which camera to look at. 

Alex had followed Damien around the set, spellbound, and Damon had made jokes about suspending himself in formaldehyde and Dave had engaged you in an endless feedback loop of "alright, mate?" / "fine, thanks" that continued for the duration of the shoot. Something in the back of your mind told you that you ought to appreciate it, that someone—anyone—noticed how put out you were, but you only grew more irritable as the day went on. You did not want to be acknowledged at all. 

If you had not become a musician you would have wanted to be an artist without any of the pretensions of the art world. You imagine yourself as a hermit in the countryside with an easel and canvas and paints as your only companions. 

The fucking countryside. 

You wonder where they'll bury you. Or maybe they'll cremate your body, send it up in smoke. Perhaps Damon was right and you should have left a note if only to give instructions for your funeral. You weren't even going to be able to have control over that. You are struck by the horrifying thought that someone else will be picking the music and this more than anything draws you backwards slightly. 

He finishes his cigarette. He offers the carton to you, shaking it the way you might a box of sweets to entice a small child, or a dog: "One last fag before you go?" Before you go, as though stepping off a windowsill was just the same as stepping onto a train car headed north. _Of course_ , you want to say, but you just reach for the proffered cigarette and fish in your pockets for a lighter. 

"Americans are going to say you copied Cobain, you know," he informs you. 

"Americans don't give a fuck about me," you say. "I reckon Courtney killed him anyway. Always struck me as a bit of a cunt."

He smirks at that. "D'you think they'll say I killed you? I'm a bit of a cunt myself."

A headline materializes in your mind: Blur frontman pushes bandmate out window. Because it only made sense that he would be the main subject, the active participant, in _your_ death. Another headline: Blur frontman rescues bandmate from suicidal urges. Damon would like that, being portrayed as some sort of Christ figure, ever partial to an obvious allegory. You aren't sure about the comparison to Kurt, though. You’d rather not be thought of as a copycat. You turn to make eye contact with him for the first time only to find that he is already looking at you, head slightly tilted. 

Suicide attempts don’t get written up in the tabloids unless they yield some kind of injury or otherwise fail spectacularly. If you step from the windowsill back into the sitting room, future music historians will record this night as one of pure celebration because there will be no evidence to suggest it was anything but. If you disembark from the ledge you and Damon will become the sole witnesses to what could have been the last few minutes of your life—which are now just ordinary minutes with no cosmic significance to them. No matter what you do, he will always be the first and possibly only person to know about it. You gulp in lungful after lungful of nicotine. 

He regards you. You hate that, being regarded. That’s always been his job—you the painter and he the one who poses in the middle of the classroom, contrapposto, angled just so to catch the light. You think about ancient times when artists frequented morgues in their study of anatomy, slicing open a corpse to see the tangle of muscles that held a person together so as to better depict the body whole. You have done many portraits of Damon but none that capture his infuriating luminescence. You think that maybe you would have to take a scalpel to him in order to succeed in such a task. 

If anyone else had found you up here it might have been a whole debacle, 999 dialed immediately, some sort of panicked argument in your dying breath. But he is not afraid of you or what you may do to yourself and, by extension, what you may do to him. In all your strange fixations and depressive episodes and drunken fits of rage he has not once been afraid of you. He trusts you, you realize. 

You vomit over the railing of the fire escape. 

He curses loudly. You listen for an indignant shout from the street below and when it doesn't come you breathe a sigh of relief, sagging against the wall. The cigarette butt slips from between your fingers onto the metal grating. You feel abruptly exhausted. Without your notice he’s stepped closer to you in the darkness, quietly, like a cat. It shouldn’t surprise you that he’s adopted feline patterns of behavior given the number of cats Justine keeps around the flat—cats are another thing that make you nervous in their elegance, their cold impassive gazes. It doesn’t surprise you. You wipe your lips with the back of your hand before instinctively fitting your fingers into your mouth to gnaw at the nail beds. He watches the movement of your wrist.

“Did you think it would happen like this,” you ask. Your throat aches with the burn of bile. 

He thinks about that for a moment. “Yes.” You believe him. Anyone else might have tried to clarify—the band, the fame, the two of you stood here on the edge of something dire? You taking the easy way out? But he knows what you mean. He has never been one to doubt any of his own convictions. You still remember when you told him you were going to uni for fine arts and his eyes flicked to the guitar in the corner of your bedroom before he leaned forward to embrace you in congratulations, his expression not quite one of confusion but of preternatural knowledge, complete confidence in the predictions he had privately made about you.

“I knew it,” he had whispered once into your laughing mouth, half-lain on top of you, his breath humid with wine. 

“Knew what?” you had asked. You grappled with him on the riverbank, wrestling him onto the ground and upending a bottle in the process. The elderberry dregs oozed out onto the grass and soaked into the hem of his T-shirt. This was before you soiled yourself so you considered it a victory in the moment, that you had gotten him grubby with grass stains and wine while you were still clean and dry in your sweater. 

He had looked up at you. “You love me,” he said, eyes bright and burning into yours. He tried to reach up and grab at your ears or maybe dislodge your glasses but you knocked his hands away, grinning.

“No,” you had lied, breathless with laughter and slightly sick to your stomach. 

“You do!” he had shouted. “I know you do. You love me, Graham Coxon!” Cackling madly as you sank your teeth into his neck in retaliation. 

He had not been wrong, of course. He is hardly ever wrong and when he is, he is the last to admit it. You wonder, looking at him now, if he ever finds it in himself to regret his own righteousness. You doubt it. 

You could have had a much different life than this, one of more solitude and less substance abuse. You could have made new friends at uni the way everybody else does and drifted slowly, amicably apart from Damon until you lost touch the way people do with their childhood friends. You could have run across him in Sainsbury’s on a visit to your parents and made awkward small talk in the dairy aisle before you departed in opposite directions. He could have asked about your art and you could have asked about his acting and you could have both laughed sheepishly as you admitted that you had been cocksure as boys to believe you could have been anything other than ordinary people. You could have done all this, but Damon would have rather killed you than let you be ordinary. And regardless, you would have had to live forever with the memory of him watching you play guitar for the first time, incredulity etched into his features, and the magnitude of feeling that gurgled up in your chest at the sight. Still—you would have lived anyway.

You are going to live anyway. 

His face, still inclined towards you, half-ensconced in darkness, half aglow with streetlight: chiaroscuro. Caravaggio. _The Incredulity of St. Thomas_ , the unabashed literalness of the old man pressing his finger into Christ’s wound. No symbolism there, no abstraction, no blood. Just flesh and awe. Painting is what killed Caravaggio in the end, poisoned by years of breathing in fumes and absorbing lead carbonate into his skin as he worked at his easel. Or he might have been murdered, prone as he was to drunken brawls. But the paint had driven him mad and weakened his body. Perhaps the same had happened to van Gogh, but the more likely explanation was that he had wanted to die, like Rothko and Gorky and that American girl had wanted to die, and then did. You glance six stories down where the pavement is now foul with the inside of your stomach and a flicker of want goes through you still, the sick security in knowing you could. You glance backwards where he is watching you, waiting. 

You leave the window open, the August breeze its own kind of lingering presence in the late night-early morning.

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from [a painting by RB kitaj](https://www.wikiart.org/en/r-b-kitaj/apotheosis-of-groundlessness), another painter who committed suicide albeit a decade after the events of this story. 
> 
> unfortunately [the detail about graham shitting himself](http://imgbox.com/EkRt5yxr) is true.
> 
> [i'm also here.](https://holdoncallfailed.tumblr.com/)


End file.
